by Doug Thorne
Special thanks to
Alfred Wallon and David Whitehead
for their contribution to this novel
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
Copyright
ONE
Glancing skyward, Cal Hennessy thought, No doubt about it. The summer of ’74 was going to be a real killer.
The last decent rainfall was already a distant memory, and even those few tinajas – natural water-tanks – with which the Llano Estacado was occasionally blessed, were slowly but surely drying up. With no clouds to soften the hammer-blow of the sun, the stagnant, sluggish air hanging above the desert fairly quivered with heat.
Drawing his reins together and urging his shaggy grey gelding forward again, he scanned his surroundings once more. The picture hadn’t changed all that much in the last few minutes. The desert – what Anglos like himself called the Staked Plains – stretched away to every point of the compass in a seemingly endless sea of burned-out grass cut through with vast stretches of loose sand. The only relief came from the occasional stand of cottonwood or juniper and, of course, the stunted, ever-present mesquite, flowering for the second time in as many months now that summer was really getting into its stride.
Hennessy himself was as tough as his surroundings: tall and brawny, with a thatch of wheat-coloured hair that fell to the collar of his buckskin shirt. He wore the shirt outside his pants and pulled in tight at the waist by a soft leather weapons belt. The pants – riveted blue-jeans, tucked into quilled, knee-high moccasins with rawhide soles – were patched and snug-fitting, and the stiffened, broad-brimmed hat which now threw his square, tanned face into shadow, had long-since faded to a pale shade of its original black.
His weapons, by contrast – a Colt .45 holstered at his right hip and a sheathed ten-inch bowie knife sitting at his left, plus a Winchester .44/.40 in a scabbard buckled to his McClellan saddle – were clean and well-maintained. But this would come as no surprise to anyone who knew him, for Hennessy’s guns were the tools of his trade, and he treated them like best friends because they’d saved his life more times than one.
In fact, he told himself suddenly, it could very well be that they were about to save him again.
A dozen or so buzzards were wheeling through the otherwise empty sky a quarter-mile ahead, dropping ever lower towards the ragged slash of a winding arroyo that cut through the desert floor like an open wound.
Instinctively his right hand dropped towards the .45, for in his experience, buzzards usually meant trouble: that it had happened recently, was about to happen or was happening right this minute. And Hennessy, an adventurer by profession, had a habit of running into trouble with disturbing frequency.
As he drew closer to the steep-sided watercourse – which was dry as a bone at this time of year, of course, just like the rest of this Godforsaken wilderness – the buzzards landed out of sight and began to chatter among themselves in their raucous croak and caw.
He looked to left and right, ahead and behind, wondering if trouble would come in the shape of Comanche or Kiowa or both. He had friends among the Nermernuh, as the Comanches called themselves, but he had enemies as well. And ever since the whites had started breaking the Medicine Lodge Treaty of ’67 with increasing regularity, tensions in and around these parts had been running steadily higher.
But everything around the arroyo was quiet save for the cries of the buzzards, as they inspected whatever it was they’d found. Not that there was much comfort in that, necessarily. Hennessy knew all too well that an Indian only ever let you see him if he wanted you to. If not, he could and did remain invisible until the moment he chose to make his move, and most whites didn’t know a thing about it till they woke up dead.
Suddenly he tensed and drew rein again. He could smell the faintest remnants of a campfire on the air. No, he corrected himself almost immediately, not a campfire. Something more sinister than that….
A moment later he reached the lip of the arroyo and saw the blackened, still-smouldering skeleton of a burned-out Murphy wagon directly below: that, and the two fly-covered dead men sprawled beside it, being approached now by the buzzards who, true to form, were figuring to start the feast with their victims’ eyes.
Although he could have sent the birds on their way with a single shot skyward, he knew better than to advertise his presence in the vicinity. Instead, he found a spot nearby where the arroyo wall had caved in on itself and urged the gelding down into the gully itself, and his arrival alone was sufficient to scatter the feasting flies and send the buzzards back into the air with an indignant flapping of tousled wings.
Up close, the stink of burnt flesh turned his stomach, and he had to swallow hard to keep from losing his meagre breakfast as he ran his ice-blue eyes across the scene before him. The wagon was standing on its nose against the nearside wall, its two-horse team lying crumpled and very dead beneath it. It looked as if the wagon had accidentally tipped into the arroyo, killing the team, splintering the front half of the box and leaving its two passengers afoot and most likely injured.
What was left of the dead men’s clothes identified them as buffalo hunters, most probably from Adobe Walls, an ancient Spanish stockade not far from here, which men in their line had recently turned into an unofficial fur-trading settlement.
Neither did it take much imagination to work out what had led to the tragedy. As he figured it, the wagon had been travelling at speed, its occupants throwing caution to the wind in their determination to outrun whoever was pursuing them. Unfortunately, they’d run themselves right into the arroyo instead, and after that they’d had no place else to go.
The state of the dead men left him in no doubt as to just whom those pursuers had been. Comanches. Kwahadi Comanches, if he read the sign correctly. They were masters when it came to making their enemies suffer, and what had happened here proved it beyond all doubt.
He dismounted and tied his skittish horse to the blackened remains of a ruined wagon-hoop, then took a closer look around. The wagon’s charred side-boards were still warm to the touch, which told him that the slaughter had taken place earlier that day, maybe a little after sun-up. The Comanches had scalped the first of the hide men while he was still alive, then set a fire in his belly and settled back to watch while he burned from the inside out. They’d even propped his head up with a couple of rocks so that he could watch along with them. They were considerate like that.
As for the other one—
He was just turning towards the second corpse when it groaned, and he realized that the corpse was actually no such thing: that, incredibly, the man had survived everything the Comanches had done to him and was still alive.
He hurried over and dropped to his knees beside the man, whose bloody, beaten features were now beginning to stir. The Indians had pared off his ears and chopped off his fingers, and Hennessy tried not to look at what they’d done to his crotch any longer than he had to. The man’s lips moved, but when no sound emerged, Hennessy leaned closer until he could just about decipher the painful rasp.
‘Water. P-please, gimme some water.’
He went back to his horse and fetched his canteen. A moment later he was kneeling beside the dying man again, cradling his head with one hand, holding the canteen to his blood-caked lips with the other. A few precious drops slid down the tortured man’s parched throat: more leaked from the corners of his trembling mouth.
The man grimaced then, as a new wave of pain hit him. ‘Keep … keep ridin’ …’ he gasped when it subsided. ‘W-warn B-Billy an’
the others….’
‘I’ll—’ began Hennessy, but said no more.
The dying man’s eyes rolled up in his head, he shuddered once and was gone.
Hennessy sagged. It was never easy to watch another man die, be he friend, enemy or total stranger. It made him feel powerless, angry and constantly at the mercy of an unkind fate. A few solemn moments passed, and then he got back to his feet and stoppered the canteen.
Billy, he thought, remembering the dead man’s final words.
He wondered if that would be Billy Dixon, the old friend he’d come all this way to see.
Little more than a year earlier, Hennessy had hunted buffalo with Billy Dixon, a one-time Army scout and freighter like himself. But now memories of the buffalo stirred painful emotions within him, and with good reason.
Not that many years before, vast herds had roamed the plains. They’d been numbered in the millions back then, maybe even as many as sixty million. But somewhere along the line all that had changed, and where once the magnificent bison – to give it its correct name – had stood proud, free and plentiful, there now lay only stinking carcasses and bleached bones to mark its place … and these too were numbered in the millions.
It was an image that gave him no pleasure. Indeed, he still felt guilty about his own part in the decimation of the herds up in Kansas, though he’d heard tell that men like Bill Cody remained happy to boast about killing two thousand buffalo every year all by themselves.
The man who’d just died had killed them as well, and now he’d paid the ultimate price for it. But then, he’d known the risks he was taking. This was Comanche country, after all, a mere fraction of that vast, untamed expanse known as Comancheria, and white men had no real business being here and were in fact prohibited by government treaty from plying their bloody trade south of the Arkansas River.
That didn’t stop the hide men, though, not when the rewards for such wholesale slaughter were so great. Hennessy had heard that right now, skins alone could fetch three or four dollars each, and while that might not sound like much, it looked a damn’ sight more impressive when you multiplied it by Cody’s two thousand.
He allowed himself a tired sigh. All was quiet save for the occasional crack of overheated wagon boards and the persistent buzzing of flies beyond number. Neither had the buzzards gone far, he noted. But if he had anything to do with it, they wouldn’t be feeding on these poor sonsofbitches today. They’d suffered enough, he reckoned, and he felt that a decent burial was the least he could give them.
He turned, intending to tie the canteen back around his saddle horn and then apply himself to his grim task – but froze instead.
No more than twenty yards away, eight statue-still Kwahadis were sitting their horses silently along the northern rim of the arroyo, rising coppery and impassive towards the steel-blue sky beyond. That they spelled trouble was all too obvious, for they carried bows, lances, hatchets, even the odd pistol or saddle-gun, and had their bronzed faces painted with the reds and blacks of war.
They eyed him coldly for a long, heavy moment, while he in turn wondered how the hell so many could have come upon him so quietly, and whether or not they intended that he should share the same fate as the men he’d been planning to bury.
Briefly he considered reaching for the .45 so that he could at least take a few of them to meet Satan with him. But then it came to him that if the Comanches had wanted to kill him, he’d be dead by now.
That made him think again, and quickly then he tried to remember some of the pidgin Comanche he’d learned and then forgotten twelve months earlier. Cursing his lousy memory, he finally raised his right hand, palm out, and said, ‘Haa maruawe.’
That surprised them, as he’d hoped it would, for whatever else they’d been expecting him to do, they certainly hadn’t expected him to greet them in their own uniquely intimidating tongue.
An Indian at the centre of the line said, ‘Unha numu techwa eju?’
Hennessy shook his head and replied haltingly, ‘Niatz. Taibo tekwapu.’
‘Unha hakai nahniaka?’ asked the Indian.
‘Nu nahnia tsa Hennessy.’
His frown deepening now, the Indian kicked his spotted pony forward and down into the arroyo, leaving the rest of his men where they were. He, like almost every male Comanche, looked to be short and stocky, with the warped legs of a life-long horseman. He was bare-chested but for a breastplate fashioned out of buffalo bones, and wore fringed leggings. His long, greasy black hair was centre-parted, and framed a copper-coloured face that was flat and round, with deep-set eyes and flared nostrils. It was hard to put an age to him, as it was to so many Indians, but Hennessy figured he must be in his early twenties, a few years younger than Hennessy himself.
As he came closer, Hennessy was surprised to recognize him. Their paths had crossed about a year before, during which time a sort of nodding acquaintanceship had developed between them. His name was … Hennessy searched for a moment, then had it: Eagle Hand. He was a young brave whose courage was beyond question, but who could sometimes be hotheaded and hasty in his judgments. As Hennessy recalled it, Eagle Hand had later started riding with a Comanche-white half-breed called Quanah Parker.
One look at the Comanche’s chiselled face told him that recognition was mutual. Eagle Hand halted his mount no more than four yards away, studied him some more, then said in deep, slow English, ‘Hennessy. Is a bad time for you to pass through this country.’
‘This I know,’ Hennessy replied, also reverting to English. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the dead buffalo hunters. ‘You have been busy, I see.’
A hard grin touched Eagle Hand’s mouth, and he clenched his left hand and shook it forcefully. ‘They butcher the buffalo, these whites,’ he said, speaking through set teeth. ‘They slaughter P’te for no other reason than that they can. Is it right that we should watch and do nothing, while your people take everything from us?’ In answer to his own question, he shook his head. ‘You have shared the life of the Nermernuh, Hennessy. You above all others should know what P’te means to us.’
Hennessy knew, right enough – he knew what the buffalo meant to all the Plains Indians, if it came to that. It meant everything. But this wasn’t his fight, and he didn’t figure to buy into it.
‘I don’t want any trouble with you, Eagle Hand,’ he said, already starting to regret his decision to head for Adobe Walls at just this time, for no other reason than to shake Billy Dixon’s hand once more and recollect their rambunctious past together over a lukewarm beer or three. ‘I look upon your cousin, Stormbringer, as a friend, and I see you in the same light.’
‘Your friendship with Stormbringer flourished in a different time,’ Eagle Hand responded. ‘Much has happened since then, and much has come to pass. The great shaman, Isatai, tells us that the time has come to chase your people from this land. That only then will the buffalo return, and everything be as it was in the Shining Times.’
Reluctant as he was to get involved, Hennessy had to shake his head when he heard that. ‘The Shining Times have gone, Eagle Hand, and will never return,’ he pointed out. ‘This, I believe, your heart already knows. But know this, too. If you start a war, the bluecoats will come – and come in numbers you can’t even begin to imagine – and you will die. Maybe all of you. Is that what you want?’
‘This I do not want,’ Eagle Hand returned. ‘But there will be war. This, Isatai has foreseen. Mother Earth will turn upside down and devour you. She will bury you and your miserable hearts, and then peace will return, and P’te will once again blacken the earth with his great herds.’ He paused, then said, ‘Hennessy, I say this to you. Ride away from this place, for if you stay, you too will die with your white brothers.’
Hearing that, Hennessy allowed himself a barely discernible sigh of relief. It wasn’t going to come to shooting, then: for old times’ sake – if you could call it that – Eagle Hand was going to let him ride free.
Before he could respond, howev
er, one of the Comanches on the rim suddenly cried, ‘Niatz!’ and leapt from his pony to scramble down into the arroyo, spilling rocks and kicking up a great cloud of yellow dust as he came.
Even before he reached Eagle Hand, he started chattering and gesturing angrily. He was young, maybe eighteen summers or so, unusually slim for a Comanche but still undeniably powerful. He wore a long breech clout, and had a tomahawk shoved into the red cloth sash that encircled his waist. His long hair was braided in what appeared to be otterskin drops.
Although Hennessy didn’t understand the half of it, the Comanche’s meaning was plain enough. He didn’t think Hennessy should get off so lightly. He was a white man, and the Sacred Powers had decreed that all white men must die. The equally headstrong bucks watching and listening from the ridge nodded and murmured agreement, so it was clear that the young Comanche was speaking for all of them.
Eagle Hand let him have his say, as was the Comanche custom, then raised one hand to silence the onlookers and shook his head. ‘Niatz!’ he intoned, much to his companions’ displeasure. The decision, he said, was his to make, and he had made it. ‘The white man lives,’ he pronounced, but added, ‘this time.’
If he’d been hoping to quell any rebellion with that particular concession, however, he was in for a disappointment. The young buck pulled a face, and then, without warning, leapt at Hennessy, lashing out with a brutal backhander that threw him off his feet.
‘Tahkay!’ roared Eagle Hand, his voice all but drowned by the sudden cacophony of approving whoops and catcalls that rose from the Indians on the rim.
But the young buck, Tahkay, paid him no mind. Spurred on by the enthusiastic hoots and hollers of his blood-hungry brothers above, he danced around for a moment, fired up by the prospect of making another kill, then snarled, ‘Maywaykin, tzensa!’ and charged at his fallen opponent, moving in a bronzed blur.
Still sprawled breathless on his back, Hennessy tasted the blood on his lip and fought down a sudden, instinctive flare of anger. That was the last thing he needed right now, because if this Tahkay had anything to do with it, he was going to have to fight after all. And the hell of it was, he daren’t do otherwise. The Comanches would take that as a sign of weakness, and if he tried turning the other cheek with these buckos, he’d more than likely get it hacked off.